Dynamic Year Over Year Calculations on Einstein Analytics / Tableau CRM

I have seen this being requested multiple times in the community. How do you calculate year over year metrics? How to handle the dates to automatically find the previous year? Etc.

I will try to answer those and more questions in this article.

I am assuming you are familiar with Bindings and SAQL. At least a little.

Let’s start with the dataset. You need to understand your data and check if you have what you need before you start working. For this exercise we will use a very simple dataset with a few columns: “accounting_date”, “revenue_amount”. You can download it in case you want to follow along using the same data.

yoy_dataset.csv

After we have our CSV file we just need to create the dataset in EA:

Be sure to select the right date format. EA is pretty good guessing the format but sometimes it inverts the day and month.

Here is the XMD file in case you have issues with the date format. Use it at the moment you are uploading the…